One of the questions I am often asked by clients and students alike is – “Can astrology tell me what my purpose really is?” I looked at the astrologer advertisement section of the recent issue of ‘The Mountain Astrologer,’ and found that one of the common themes of these ads is that astrologers are openly saying that astrology can ‘tell you’ what your purpose is. Sometimes they will say ‘Soul-Purpose.’ The mere mentioning of this will be so hypnotic that the reader of this ad could feel very enticed by its potential promise and so might want a reading so that they can learn what their purpose really is. It is indeed, a truly important human need, is it not?

Why is it so important to us? Perhaps, the most basic reason is that most of us feel, at least at some point, lost in life. We want to know such things as what we should be doing, where will I find fame and fortune, will I be successful and then we believe or hope that astrology can answer these types of questions, so we go to astrologers for our answers. It is my view that this subject can be so fascinating that one can jump headlong into a search for answers without asking one very important question, which has two basic parts. They can be described as follows:

What are the actual assumptions of my question?

Will the answer being told to me by another person actually be sufficient or truly satisfying?

The Assumptions

It can be helpful to really look and discover what it is that one is seeking. What is the nature of the drive in us that seeks to discover our purpose? Where are we looking and how can we find it in that place? Can a person tell another person what their purpose really is? These are some of the questions that can be ignored in our sometimes frantic and vague search.

The thoughts I will express here are certainly not the last word on the matter, but hopefully it can give us a good starting point. What I have discovered when I’m with a friend or client who is asking this type of question is that they are experiencing an ‘emptiness’ along with a great fear of that ‘emptiness.’ There is a consideration that if that emptiness is filled, that one will feel better, and that the way to filling it, will come from knowing one’s purpose. But what is one seeking when they look for ‘purpose?’ Is it an answer that is focused on an external role, job or relationship that, once found, will hopefully take away the pain and doubt caused by this dreaded ‘emptiness?’ It is my view that what we are really seeking is relief from a fundamental anxiety that all of us feel, simply because we exist. It is arising out of the fact that we are alive and we don’t know whether or not our life has any meaning. We are in real doubt about this and hope that if we find our purpose, we also will find our meaning.

But will we? If I tell someone that their purpose is to be a chef, CEO, spouse and/or parent, will that really help us? Sure, it can be helpful to learn of the role we can play in the world. I do not mean to trivialize this need. But will it give us the relief we are actually looking for in an existential sense? In fact, can any external factor give us this? Will money, success, fame, etc. give us the meaning we are seeking? I don’t think it will and my guess is that most of my readers don’t believe it either.

So, if astrology is to be of any real assistance to us in the deeper sense of which I am speaking, astrology needs to be capable of more than just advising us in external matters. For it to be helpful to us in our existential challenge, it must help us discover meaning. If it attempts to answer these important questions only by focusing on external factors, is it not limiting itself greatly and making itself irrelevant to the question of meaning and a sense of purpose that goes beyond the roles we play in life? And finally, if astrologers do this and only this, are we not contributing to the illusion and false hope that if we only know what we should be ‘doing’ in the external world, that we will suddenly become filled with a great sense of meaning and thereby cease to feel that quite genuine experience of ‘emptiness’ and the fear we have of that?

Astrology at Its Best – A Tool for the Discovery of Meaning

So, yes, astrology can contribute to our discovery of our purpose in the external world, but that is not when astrology is at its best. What astrology is capable of being is a tool that opens us to having a different relationship with our life and with the world in general. This is what can help us and can even begin a process where we can deal directly with the issue of ‘emptiness’ or lack of meaning we feel. How can astrology enter this area of life, an area usually reserved for religion, philosophy, psychology, etc.?

Actually, it is this factor that causes me to prefer teaching to consulting people only. Yes, an astrological consultation can be helpful as we navigate our way through our everyday life and confront the present problems we face. Astrology is indeed capable of assisting us in this. But when we begin to learn more about the world of astrology, something much bigger and more profound can occur. I asked several graduate students to tell me how the immersion in astrology affected them and all said that it changed their world. However, it changed them more on the inside than the outside. Their view of their life had become richer and their understanding of time and their relationship to it has transformed them. How can the study of astrology do this?

Here are some of their edited and shortened synopses, some of which have to be in my words rather than theirs:

1. When I realized (not just cognited) that my life revealed by my birth chart was linked to already existing archetypes, I felt that I was connected to Life itself and to time as well, i.e. past, present and future. I found that this feeling of deep and profound connection was reducing my sense of alienation and emptiness that had been my constant companion.
2. The more I studied my transits, the more I felt that at certain moments, I really was free to make choices that could send me in a much better direction than where I had been. I just needed to be more conscious of my programming or patterns, which astrology helped me to see, so that I could choose to operate in a different way. I didn’t see astrology as forcing me to do things or controlling me, but as a tool for discovering my patterns which were controlling me and as way to greater freedoms.
3. The more deeply I got into the planets, signs, houses and aspects, the more I understood better ways to deal with my life. I had no idea there were so many levels to life. The more I understood, the more I felt free and could see that life is not meaningless.
4. It’s all about learning. That’s what life really is. I can go through life unaware of what I’m doing and never really learn from life or go through it with awareness and find that each day is an amazing opportunity to discover new things and grow.
5. When I had learned the astrology basics, I began to look at both good and bad events in my past. I looked at transits, progressions, solar arcs, etc. I was shocked to see that what was happening to me in my life, all the events which I believed were just random events, turned out to be cycles of unfolding and not random at all. Events which I thought were disconnected from one another, turned out to be completely connected. I just couldn’t see it at the time. I was so immersed and focused on the crisis that I couldn’t see it in a broader perspective. With time and perspective, this changed and a deeper pattern was revealed so that I began to feel that I was evolving rather than just revolving like being on a merry-go-round. Life had meaning, after all.

Astrology Reveals Life as a Process

When we see, even in a small way, that life is not a random, meaningless set of events, our way of Being-in-the-World changes and life becomes a much richer, meaningful set of opportunities from which we can learn and grow. Each day becomes full of meaning and discovery.

I’m certainly not suggesting that astrology is the only way, the only path to this, but it is one way. And when it is used in this way, it becomes one tool of transformation where we no longer feel that life is meaningless and empty. This is why I used astrology as a therapist and now use it as a teacher. When practiced in the ways that I’ve described, astrology can be a very powerful way of assisting us to move to higher levels of consciousness and even evolution.

This subject of this newsletter article has been motivated by the crisis of a close friend of mine. May it help this person as well as many of my readers. As always, I encourage you to respond to this article and express how it affected you.

Jupiter is the planet that signifies expansion. It does this in many ways. It can expand our learning by urging us to seek greater understanding through the study of philosophy, religion and higher (abstract) concepts. Also, Jupiter can motivate us to travel which can enable us to experience people, societies and cultures completely outside our own personal limited experience which provides us a platform for discovering a broader basis for finding meaning in our lives. Every time you feel your mind expand or your understanding grow, you are living in Jupiter’s realm. For the most part, however, Jupiter does stay in a relatively conventional area. When Jupiter dominates a person they often find themselves in careers of law, education, or religion, etc. Maybe even a quantum physicist or two will be found as well. What they have in common is that they seek to understand how the world works and perhaps desire to teach what they have learned.

Neptune though, takes us into very different territory, a world that is beyond mere words or knowledge. Its world is one of imagination, dreams and an idealized sense of how we are all united in some way, though the feelings often cannot be described. Neptune destroys that sense of separateness and as such can confuse us and bring about an enormous sense of groundlessness that is somehow both scary and exciting at the same time. With Jupiter we can talk, discuss, theorize, debate and write all kinds of books and treatises, but with Neptune we become speechless and seek ways of communication that go way beyond mere words, such as music, art, painting, and theater, etc. We feel moved to enter the world of the universal or archetypal, or whatever words we use to describe that which underlies the mundane world. We sense that the ‘real’ world is a mere superficial layer of existence, the tip of a very deep world that actually creates and supports us.

Jupiter and Neptune Coming Together

When we look at charts of people who have strong aspects between these two giants, we see visionaries, idealists and people of great compassion and imagination. They see through the lens of Love… not a love limited to the personal, but a devotional, even an impersonal love that makes no distinctions between self and another. In music we find Enya, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane and Judy Collins who exemplify the incredible ability to tap into deep wells of human desire for some sort of perfection. In mythology, the pioneer Joseph Campbell saw the universal archetypes operating throughout the cultures of the world. Carl Jung developed a philosophical system that combined psychology and spirituality in a way that is so new and historic that it is still being developed today and is affecting many different disciplines.

Cooperating and Working With this Transit

The way in which this transit will affect an individual will, of course, depend on the nature and potentials of that birth chart of that person. Some will not feel this transit very much as they may not be able to resonate with its subtle urgings. But for those of us who can feel these forces, when expansionistic Jupiter meets boundless Neptune we are moved to reach some sort of higher (more inclusive) ground. But this journey is not something that can be mapped out or planned. To fixate on a goal is to prematurely create a limitation that could needlessly confine us. Moving into a truly new experience always involves a letting go of the past (conditioning) and an embracing of the unknown. What we may find however, may be something that feels eerily familiar. As we break free from rigid confines of our inner structures, we may discover openings to our deepest Self. This “free state” may be sensed as our own ‘real home’, a state that is, at least for a few moments, completely unconditioned. Could this feel unreal? Of course, but we may do well to consider that it isn’t as unreal as we think, but closer to being our true state. This is where we experience a hope that regards anything and everything as possible, that we live in a boundless, multi-dimensional universe that is hidden from us only by our own conditioning.

These are the dynamic potentials of Jupiter and Neptune operating together. It is possible that some could have a ‘peak’ experience that can last for quite a while. But what is more likely is that we will open up or be opened for brief moments that give us a hint, a smell of something far deeper than what we usually allow ourselves to feel.

Sorrow or a Beautiful Sadness

There is no avoiding a side of Neptune that is so difficult to describe, but it is necessary to try. Imagine you are in a spaceship from another solar system and you are entering this one. You have sensors on your ship that can measure the joy and pain of the people living on a planet you are investigating. What do you think the readings of planet Earth would look like? Would you see a lot of joyful readings? I don’t think so. You might be seeing measurements of so much pain and sorrow you would turn your ship around and get away from our solar system as fast as possible. Life on planet Earth is rough and to begin to feel it requires a deep sensitivity, but also something else. It would require a willingness to feel something that we don’t like to feel at all. The planetary pair of Jupiter and Neptune could open a door to our being able to perceive the deep sorrow of what it is to be human. But there is more as well. For alongside sorrow is a nobility and beauty that reflects the co-existing other side that is immensely joyful. To know the sensation-emotion of ‘beautiful sadness’ is to begin to know what it is to be truly human and that is the gift that awaits when we surrender personal ego and immerse ourselves into the consciousness of life.

The Shadow Side

As always, there is a negative or shadow side to any transit of which we would do well to remain aware. The first is the attempt to escape from one’s own (or the World’s) shadow. True integration always demands that we see all sides of any situation, including our own nature. Each of us has aspects of our psyche that we don’t approve of, which we then repress. This is what the term ‘shadow’ means. Some have called this tendency the ‘spiritual bypass.’ We leap so high and feel so good that we want to stay in this feeling of great joy or ecstasy and will do whatever we can to bypass all those things that could bring us down. One friend calls this –‘staying in the cumbaya moment.’ It is vital that while we validate these idyllic moments for they are indeed harbingers of future, potent possibilities. But to actually live in these higher states, we must honor the dark, grungy, yucky, sucky feelings that compose a part of each and every day of our lives. This is our battle, isn’t it? We can be enticed into staying in our Shangri-La sense of perfection or commit ourselves to engage in the ‘holy’ battle with both sides of our nature, which can lead to what is perhaps an evolutionary state for the human race.

The second area of concern is zealotry. An amazing spiritual experience or insight MUST be shared, right? We are full of life and want others to feel it too. But did dogma or the reading of a book or maybe the attending of a lecture or seminar take us to the heights? Or were we blessed by a Grace we do not understand and did not control? And can our journey be duplicated for another or is the truth that each of us has our own journey, a journey that is uniquely ours to travel and be transformed in just the way we need? Perhaps there is no path but our own. If we find ourselves wanting to share our good fortune, perhaps we also can retain the knowing that the Divine is never asleep and that no one needs to be converted.

By the way, a wonderful example of the Jupiter-Neptune-Chiron in Aquarius archetype can be found on the new show called “The Philanthropist.” Its appearance on network TV completely coincides with this transit. Our hero uses his fortune to seek ways to overcome national boundaries and create solutions to the world’s major problems. It is utopian, unrealistic and impossible in the ‘real’ world. Gotta love this stuff!

In my view, this 2-year dance between these two giants and the one asteroid (Chiron) is doing much more than focusing our attention on health care, especially in the U.S. The reason why it is especially significant here is that all this is going over the Moon of the U.S. chart, which is at 27 deg. of Aquarius. The meaning of the Moon in a nation’s chart is important for it reflects the national mood of the people. It amplifies our sensitivities to all those things that enable us to feel safe and secure as a people and where we are vulnerable. Obviously it can also cause the nation to feel vulnerable, worried and concerned about where we are at as a nation without knowing from where the feeling is coming. (I’m not going to focus on the economy in this series of articles though this factor is clearly influencing all of the issues involved in these transits).

Neptune, the planet of dissolution, affecting a nation’s Moon does more than just create confusion and uncertainty. It can bring about the sense that everything we have depended on in the past is no longer something on which we can rely. We begin to feel the need to question everything not knowing if it’s even possible to come to any clarity. Because of the fact that Neptune moves so slowly, taking over 150 years to orbit the Sun, transits of this order affect a nation in a huge way. The collective consciousness of this nation will not be the same as it was before it all started.

So, what might be the issue that is forcing its way into the collective framework of the nation and the World? To me and to other astrologers the issue that is underlying all of this is the issue of climate change or global warming. This issue is certainly being regarded as important, but a very high level of denial is still in place and still rules any attempt to have a real debate about what to do. The so-called many reasons for not doing anything significant are still controlling the issue, at least for now. But I do not see how this will continue in the next year or two as Neptune will bring forward any issue that cannot be handled by only one nation. The issue of climate change is such that the only way it can even begin to be worked on is by the nations of the World, especially the industrial nations, coming together. And before this can happen, something fundamental must change in the collective consciousness of the people, which is the Moon of a nation. A huge paradigm change is becoming absolutely necessary. Most scientists know it. Most people actually know it. But, I believe that it is this transit that will create such a profound mark on us, that we will be forced to begin contemplating real action. Perhaps this is the issue that will bring the entire World together in a way that is truly historic, but that seems so far off that it is barely worth mentioning.

The astrologer and author, Jessica Murray, has written a wonderful book about the United States chart called “Soul-sick Nation” as well as a recent article in “The Mountain Astrologer”. In her recent articles, she states that ‘humanity as an intelligent collective’ is undergoing a ‘mass meltdown.’ Before anything truly new can be incorporated into the collective consciousness there first must be an often painful process of letting go of all of the old assumptions and trusted views of what life is and how it should be lived. This at first will be experienced as a very real threat. I’m not referring to the actual threat of global warming and climate change, but to the way in which humanity first responds to this threat. Denial is often the first response and is the one we are still seeing.

In the election between Obama and McCain it seemed to many that a ‘culture war’ was underlying the entire debate which lead to confusion, not only about the candidates themselves, but even about why one supported one and rejected the other. To me, Neptune over the Moon of a nation will amplify this and in fact, this transit hasn’t fully begun yet. It’s not merely about being conservative or liberal? In fact, it’s not about anything we can understand clearly. It’s deeper and more fundamental than that. We can think of it as more of how a person reacts to uncertainty and the feeling of chaos. Some people have great difficulty with such feelings and react with fear and blame. On the other side a person can react with the sense that new things are now possible and see the crisis as an opportunity for great new paradigms to be born. Most of us are likely to react in ways that are a little of both as we can sense that something very good could arise from something that remains elusive and unclear.

I will be writing much more on the Jupiter-Neptune-Chiron theme in future newsletter articles as this theme is likely to capture our attention for many years to come.